British researcher Tim Berners-Lee (far right) and American researchers Robert Kahn (far left), Lawrence Roberts (second from left), and Vinton Cerfy (second from right) are shown in a laptop's screen during a joint news conference in Oviedo, Spain, on October 24, 2002.
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Alonso Gonzalez/Reuters
2001
An English computer programmer named Tim Berners-Lee, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), introduced the World Wide Web. It allowed the internet to be a web of information rather than simply a network to send and receive files. To achieve this, he developed the technology behind hypertext markup language (HTML), uniform resource identifier/universal resource locator (URI or URL), and hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). All of these innovations exist in the current internet structure today. Berners-Lee turned over the technology to the public domain in 1993.